Previously on Self-made Motherhood blog, our heroine was advocating for herself like a motha to get RE2 on board with the original recipe plan - monitored Femara/Letrozole cycle with a trigger shot and progesterone support for the tww (especially since finding out that a single round of injectables featuring FSH would cost a little over $3200. Hard pass.). Eventually, and not without considerable effort and strife on our heroine's part, grace was given and Letrozole was prescribed. And here we are...
My cycle started like clockwork on October 3 (a Tuesday). I called in to RE2 to report the start of my cycle and get the Rx for the Femara (turns out my insurance covered Letrozole, same-same), and asked for the higher dose (5mg daily instead of 2.5mg - two pills a day instead of one). I was also told to call the nurse's line to schedule my monitoring ultrasound (scheduled it for cd11, the following Friday (not Comic Con Friday), at 7am in the Jersey City office - p.s. I didn't even know they had a Jersey City office). Picked up the Letrozole at my local pharmacy (10 pills for less than $1.29 with my insurance!!! Clomid had cost me $26 for 10 pills & $47 for 20 pills. I hate the healthcare industry in the US. Total clusterfuck of uselessness and bureaucracy designed to make rich people richer instead of actually helping regular people get the care that they need). I also had to call the specialty pharmacy to have them send just the HCG trigger shot. They said they were sending me generic, but when it arrived it was Pregnyl, the name brand. It also came with super long (well, 1.5") needles for intramuscular injection which had me freaked all the way out because I'd been trained for the half inch subcutaneous injections into the belly fat. This was not that. More on that later. On my alibi day off on Friday, I got an email from the First Steps program. Guess what? I qualified for 5% off! You read that right: A WHOLE 5% DISCOUNT OFF OF $3200!!!! WHAT A BARGAIN!!! So that was a good laugh. Glad I'd advocated so hard for myself and was already underway with Plan B. I started the Letrozole on Saturday the 7th. (Side note: If single little me doing this all on my own with no partner to fill out their half of the proof of income paperwork is only eligible for 5% off the cost of meds, how do married/partnered people afford any of this?? They'd have to be damn near homeless to qualify for any financial assistance. How, Sway???) Work messaged me to see how I was feeling about my alibi (*cough-cough*comiccon*cough-cough*). I said I was feeling okay, but not great.....and that I had my follow up scheduled for the following Friday (again, not completely untrue. I had my "follow-up" cd11 ultrasound to see how I responded to the Letrozole). See how I made that Comic Con alibi work for me in my actual real life?
Turns out the Jersey City office is super easy to get to from my house (2 stops from my home station to Hoboken and then a 10 minute walk), and since the appointment was at 7am, the morning rush hour trains were running very frequently. I could do my appointment and likely still get to work by 8:30 (only 30 minutes late). Remember when I said I didn't even know they had a Jersey City office? Yeah, apparently neither does their website nor their answering service. I woke up at 3am on Friday panicked because I couldn't remember the address for the office. I looked all over their website and found not a single mention. I started to think maybe I'd imagined it, but then I saw an ad advertising that they were looking for a Spanish speaking intake nurse or their Newark and Jersey City offices. So it definitely wasn't a figment of my imagination. By this time, it was after nearing 5am and I needed to de-fuzz my body (hate the idea of going to a gyno visit without being properly groomed) and shower. I was in the shower when I realized that I had looked up the office address while I was on the phone with the nurse scheduling the appointment. I ran from the bathroom to dive through a week's worth of internet browsing history. Found it! Crisis averted! I had to run to get ready to catch the 6:12am train. Made it and got to the office (which has a different clinic name than the one I usually go to in Newark, so I wasn't sure I was in the right place at first). RE2 arrived shortly after I'd had my blood pressure taken, so I stepped out of my under things and hopped up on the table. I told her if anything was going on, it was on the left side and I was right.
Details: I had two follies on the right (18x12 & 8x8). Three on the left (18x23, 18x14, & 12x8). My lining was at 7 (millimeters, I guess...?), which she said was normal, but the lower end of normal ("we see pregnancies with linings anywhere between 7 and 9."). She asked if I'd received the trigger shot. I told her I had brought it with me because I was a little freaked out by the long needles (understatement) and I had questions about how to do it because it's not what the nurse at the other clinic had trained me for. She said it was great that I'd brought it with me because my follicles were a good size and she could have the nurse do the shot for me right there in the office and then I could do the insem tomorrow morning (she was still very obviously not too jazzed about me doing my own IUI at home, but she also realized that she was only at the Shrewsbury office the next day and that is FAAAR. Plus, she seemed surprised yet satisfied with all of my answers to her questions about my process). I asked her about progesterone support for the luteal phase and she kind of balked a bit, saying that they really don't prescribe progesterone anymore. I explained that I was really worried about my cycle length and I wanted to give everything the best chance possible, and she agreed to give me an Rx for the pill form. So that was all done. RE2 left and the nurse came back to do the trigger shot for me. Seriously, how do people inject themselves into their own butt muscle? I'm glad I'd brought it with me. It did hurt, but not as much as I'd thought it would, and there was no soreness at all afterward. I managed to get back to the train station so quickly that my same e-ticket was still valid and I made it to work by 8:30am as promised! I went about my day at work as usual. Tired as hell from being awake since 3am, but more or less normal.
I did a pregnancy test at home because I'm weird and wanted to see what a proper positive looks like while I still have the HCG in my system (as opposed to the few barely there, nearly invisible, very, very faint positives that I've gotten in the past). Also because I usually make myself crazy agonizing over if/when/how early to test and I figured I'd get it out of my system since you have to wait a full two weeks before the HCG from the trigger shot clears your system to see if you're really knocked up or not. So, that was fun.
Welp! Now we wait...Stay tuned...
No comments:
Post a Comment